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Browse news articles about J-PAL and our affiliated professors, and read our press releases and monthly global and research newsletters. For media inquiries, please email us.

Marketing Rainfall Insurance in India

Sarthak Gaurav
Jeremy Tobacman
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of providing financial literacy education alongside various marketing strategies to small-scale farmers in Gujarat, India, on their demand for rainfall index insurance. Financial education had a significant effect on adoption of...

The Role of the VAT for Tax Enforcement

The Value Added Tax (VAT) system, which generates a paper trail on transactions between firms, facilitated tax enforcement by spreading the impact of enforcement measures up the production chain in a study with over 400,000 firms in Chile.

Improving Student Learning through Classroom Technology Adoption in Pakistan

Waqas Halim
Umar Saif
Researchers partnered with the Government of Pakistan to conduct two parallel randomized evaluations to test the impact of providing supplemental teaching materials on the quality of student learning and teachers’ effectiveness. Overall, the eLearn Classroom intervention improved student achievement...

Reducing Imbalanced Fertilizer Use Through Rule-Of-Thumb Instructions in Bangladesh

Mahnaz Islam
Fertilizer use has been promoted to boost agricultural productivity and increase farmers’ yields and income. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation among rice farmers in Bangladesh to evaluate the impact of providing leaf color charts and basic training on the quantity and timing of...

The Effect of Information on Employee Evaluation in the United States

Researchers evaluated the effect of distributing “value-added” teacher evaluations to principals in New York City. Their findings suggest that principals found the reports useful and used them to inform their overall perceptions of teacher effectiveness.

Union Leaders and Factory Workers’ Collective Action in Myanmar

Labor movements can improve workers’ lives but face great difficulty in getting workers to agree on common goals and take collective actions. In garment factory workers’ group discussions on minimum wage policies in Myanmar, researchers randomly included union leaders to study whether the presence...